Solace Crafting News

I'm hoping to push this patch to the live branch tomorrow! It's been a long time in the works! There's still a number of multi-player fixes to be had, and... as I type this I'm remembering a bug in creative mode that I don't think I've fixed yet, I'll double check that tomorrow. But overall it should be a much faster, much more stable version of the game than the current live branch.

This patch updates the world settings that were not yet working with the new world generation system. You can now once again fine tune biome frequency, as well as most things that spawn out in the world. Render distance settings are now working again as well, so players on faster or slower computers can change how far out the different systems will spawn.

There were also some bugs with grass not updating properly during terraforming, as well as a crafting window bug that was applying passive crafting skills twice to the preview item, making things look stronger than the actual item that would be crafted.

If all goes well, I will push this live tomorrow, and can start diving into some of the next steps while finishing up the last bits of multi-player that need updating (most obvious being bags).

v 0.6.4.28 2020.09.01
- Updated world creation biome settings to work with 0.6.4
- Updated world creation spawn frequency settings to work with 0.6.4
- Updated render distance settings to work with 0.6.4
- Fixed the crafting window preview adding crafting skills twice resulting in a stronger looking item than would actually be crafted
- Fixed grass not updating properly while terraforming

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

I got a bit hung up on this patch, which brings floating islands into multiplayer for the first time. There are now 8+ different possible entry and exit methods from world encounters like caves and floating islands (teleporting from one to another, teleporting from the surface to one, re-joining a server where you logged out at one, etc), and getting them all to work properly using generic terminology, as opposed to writing a custom solution for every scenario, took a bit of trial, error, and rewriting.

Mostly only a map icon error I'm still trying to track down, and bags/container support for mutliplayer, and then we should be ready to push beta to the live branch. That doesn't mean that the current beta build is flawless and won't need further attention (thank you everyone for the bug posts in Discord and here on the forums) but it is a big step forward.

v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.25
- Added floating islands back to SP and MP
- Floating islands are a bit smaller and easier to navigate now
- Fixed a number of bugs teleporting in and out of world encounters (caves and floating islands), some MP specific
- Fixed teleporters
- Fixed dropped items in caves throwing errors

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

This patch heavily reworks the ways in which caves are generated, positioned, traveled through, and more. The main goal of this is to change the entire "cave" system into a "world encounter" system that floating islands, and other "encounters" in the works can all make of use of instead of trying to setup logic for each new system as they come. This way a procedurally spawned encounter can simply be told to Generate, and it will know what to do with itself rather than all of the manager and resource and travel (etc) systems having to change their logic for different types of encounters.

A second big reason for this upgrade is to improve the way that caves are handled in multiplayer. My first attempts at setting things up was just too complicated as caves were originally built to potentially be very long, and so sectioned into "chunks" that were all handled separately. This made converting the system to work with multiplayer very difficult. Instead, I've ditched the chunk method, widened the caves over all making them much easier to navigate (though gems on the ceiling can still be quite high), and reduced the maximum depth by quite a bit.


(A random cave system)

As there are some pretty serious changes to caves with this patch, there may still be some small bugs with it, especially with planters in multiplayer, as I haven't had a chance to check on those yet. If there are any new problems I'll fix 'em up though! Tomorrow I'll be working to reform floating island management into the new World Encounter system and turn them back on, which will be a lot easier now that the system is built and working with caves. After that I'm very interested in working on a lava "portal" or "pocket dimension" encounter, something I've wanted to do for a long time.

I've found it necessary these past few weeks to spend some time working on some of the more fun things as far as game development goes. For me that's easiest explained as new features. I'm very excited to work on a new lava zone. I've been trying to just force my way through finishing up 0.6.4 and upgrading the last few things that are still not working in multi-player, but if I don't spend some time working on the fun stuff here and there I get really burnt out and my productivity nose dives. I ended up pretty much taking all of last week of to just get my life back in shape as I was kind of in a bad spot, the business part of me wanting to do nothing more than finish 0.6.4 as soon as possible, while the real me wanted to do anything but that. Those two mes fought for weeks and it all kind of blew up right as my fridge stopped working in the middle of summer.

Anyway, sorry for the short absence.
More to come!
Stay safe!

v 0.6.4.26 2020.08.19
- Widened caves and reduce their maximum depth
- Changed the way caves are generated, positioned, entered, left, and saved
- Fixed a problem with cave resources being immediately destroyed
- Fixed a problem with client side cave resources destroying nearby resources on death
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golems throwing an animation warning
- Fixed crystal and obsidian golem ragdolls
- Fixed a number of problems with navmesh data persisting after returning to the main menu

v 0.6.4.25 2020.08.07
- Fixed a bug specific to newly created worlds that could cause facilities on the start platform to disappear

Thanks to player screenshots and sharing their worlds with me I've cracked down on a number of stranger bugs in this patch. One of them unfortunately is a small math problem that was causing biomes to grow much larger than they are supposed to be able to making this patch require another world "update" due to possible height changes.

The biggest problem that was causing 3-4 seemingly different bugs, was facilities using their position to determine which terrains save data required updating, when in fact facilities are children components of player structures, meaning they should always be using the save data related to their parent structure. This was causing some buildings to duplicate and show up floating a kilometer away from their actual position, as well as facilities disappearing or reappearing after being picked back up. This patch should solve these problems and more!

Thank you again for all the detailed bug reports and shared files to help me track things down.

v 0.6.4.24 2020.08.06
- Increased small ore size
- Newly generated world encounters (caves, towers, etc) will be centered in a procedural area for easier object removal
- Returned resource rarity settings to be multipliers, maximum final rarity chance now capped at 20% for all rarities
- Fixed stone and earth elemental torso textures losing their tint after being killed
- Fixed some settings text fields being black instead of the intended white
- Fixed right-clicking to equip a sledgehammer causing a bugged sledgehammer to appear in inventory
- Fixed enchanting tables becoming unusable in some cases
- Fixed certain facilty placement issues not saving properly
- Fixed refining facilities respawning even after being picked up (related to above)
- Fixed biomes from inadventently growing too large causing terrains to not line up in rare cases
- Fixed the /stalkRewardMultiplier console command not being recognized
- Fixed terraforming not working in creative nor host modes
- Fixed an instance where structures could duplicate 1 kilometer out of position causing floating structures

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Farming is now updated for the first time to work in multi-player.

I've got a lot of messages on different platforms that have really built up over the past couple weeks. I've been a bit overwhelmed of late, as I was trying to go through them one at a time and not respond until fixing the problem entirely, and moving on to the next one. Instead I'm going to go through and gather all of them into a list I can prioritize as getting 0.6.4 working properly and pushing it live is my top priority right now. I don't really like to just give the "I'll look into it" generic response, but it's turned into more of a necessary course of action.

Be safe out there!

v 0.6.4.23 2020.08.04
- Updated farming to work in multi-player

v 0.6.4.22 2020.07.29
- Fixed a bug that could cause avatars to not load properly
- Fixed a bug that could cause plants to wilt while traveling above or below ground

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!